Sabine Iatridou

The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality

Counterfactual constructions convey the meaning that the speaker believes a certain proposition not to hold. This article investigates the morphosyntactic composition of counterfactual conditionals and counterfactual wishes and the question of how the form of counterfactuals is related to their meaning. Across languages, there are combinations of tense, mood, and aspect morphemes that are used repeatedly in the expression of counterfactuality. I discuss the role of all three components.

How to Say Ought in Foreign: The Composition of Weak Necessity Modals

In this article, we draw attention to the fact that what English expresses by the use of the weak necessity modal ought, many other languages express by combining a strong necessity modal with the morphology that appears in the consequent of a counterfactual conditional. On the hypothesis that there should be a compositional form-to-meaning mapping, we explore the semantics of weak necessity modals and propose how to derive this semantics from the combination of a strong necessity modal and counterfactual marking. Specifically, building on the semantics for weak necessity modals proposed by Sloman, we propose that weak necessity modals are the result of the promotion of a secondary ordering source of a strong necessity modal. This meta-linguistic operation is signaled or effected by counterfactual marking. The fact that it is a strong necessity modal that is counterfactually marked crosslinguistically, shows that even with weak necessity modals the quantificational force is universal.

On the contribution of conditionalthen

This paper addresses the question of whether the appearance ofthen in a conditional construction has any effect on the meaning of the sentence as a whole. It will be suggested thatthen does make a contribution by way of a particular presupposition associated with it. This also results inthen sometimes conflicting with the intended meaning of the sentence; in such cases its appearance is precluded. Certain aspects of the syntax ofthen will be discussed in parallel.

Negation, Polarity, and Deontic Modals

Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items ( PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I0; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation.

Negative DPs, A-Movement, and Scope Diminishment

Lasnik (1999) has claimed that NegDPs in derived subject position cannot be interpreted in the embedded clause and do not undergo A-chain reconstruction. We show that with a well-defined set of predicates, including deontic modals and raising predicates, scope diminishment of NegDP is observed. We argue, nevertheless, that scope diminishment in these cases is not produced by A-chain reconstruction. We also show that A-chain reconstruction of the indefinite part is possible. We conclude that the claim that NegDP does not undergo reconstruction reduces to the observation that the negative ingredient cannot reconstruct, and we suggest why this should be so. If we are correct, the analysis removes an obstacle to the view that A-chains exhibit syntactic reconstruction.

On the scopal interaction of negation and deontic modals

In this paper we argue that the different scopal relations that deontic modal auxiliaries cross-linguistically exhibit can be explained by assuming that (i) polarity effects arise in the domain of universal deontic modals and therefore not in the domain of existential deontic modals; and (ii) that all deontic modals must be interpreted VP in situ if their polarity requirements allow for that.